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2015-06-29 training log

It’s simple. Too much stress, not enough recovery. Stress isn’t always bad, it’s just stressors — even lifting is a stress. But I know most of my stress is from work, and then not enough sleep. It’s all caught up with me. Heck, last Friday I didn’t go to the gym at all — truly no motivation, felt “crispy”, and figured not adding to the stress load and body breakdown and getting more rest would do me better.

I spent the weekend relaxing. Slept in, napped a bunch. I do feel a lot better today, but certainly not out of the woods. And since I’ll be taking a very long weekend due to the Independency Day holiday, well… I figure why not use this week as a deload. My primary order of business is to destress and un-burnout, so…. deload works well into that since again, lifting is stress and breakdown on the body.

Now I do like taking jack-shit deloads and just doing nothing. But while on this body recomp, Nick prefers I at least do something. So I opted to do my normal session but dropped extra work. For example, I didn’t AMRAP nor 50% set, and I left out the high-rep work. Basically just do the main lifts, work up, and that’s that. It’s pretty much how I’ll arrange the whole week.

That said, it does make me wonder. I’ve been following Paul’s GMM program now for 8 weeks (this is my 8th). Honestly, it’s still hard for me to say if truly it’s been better for me or not — it’s just one iteration. I think I’ll need to try it multiple times with not a lot of other life-variation to see how it goes. I will say tho, while on the one hand I like it, on the other… I don’t. I realize that I sometimes get up and am like “geez… I have to squat, again?” Granted I’ve come a long way and actually enjoy squatting now, and I don’t know if my groaning came from not wanting to do it again OR from all my accumulating burnout. And I also do miss good long working of some bodypart. I find this especially with my back, that just as I start to get a good thing going, back work is done. Is that truly best for growth or just ego satisfaction? I can’t say yet.

But I am wondering… should I spend the next some weeks doing something else? Should I try a Strong-15 Short Cycle? Should I go back to a more traditional bodypart split? Should I maybe drop down to 3x week? All notions being tossed around in my head right now. We’ll see.

I don’t want to make any decisions yet, because I know I’m not in the best mind to make a straight long-term decision here. The burnout would rather me cut back and “do nothing” for a while. So let me try to get over this first… and taking this week as a deload should help.